Giancarlo was little surprised by this revelation. He did not need to be told that it was not a subject the young man wished to discuss, so he simply gave an understanding nod and looked away into the darkness.

Later, as they were unrolling their sleeping bags and preparing to settle down for the night, Giancarlo discussed with Carter what he thought their strategy should be when daylight finally returned. Left unsaid to that point, but much on the minds of both, he well knew, had been the distressing fact that come the morning, Giorgio would have been missing for three days. The question of whether they might already be too late was one that had weighed heavily on Giancarlo all that day.

“Do you think we can find him in time?” asked Carter unexpectedly, as if he had read Giancarlo’s thoughts.

“My brother is a strong man,” said Giancarlo after a moment’s contemplation. “I don’t know what has happened to him, but no matter what, I know he will fight to stay alive.The most important thing you can do right now is to search your memory to see if you can think of something he might have said, anything at all that could tell us where he went.”

“It’s all I’ve been doing,” said Carter wearily. “I keep coming up with nothing.”

“Then give it a rest,” advised Giancarlo. “Go to sleep, and maybe the answer will come to you in the night.”

Just then a baleful howling rose from somewhere in the mountains around them. Giancarlo seemed to pay it no heed, but Carter stopped what he was doing to listen.

“Wolves?” he said.

“Yes,” said Giancarlo with no more concern than if it had been a herd of sheep. “They roam all over this area. Bears and wildcats, too.”

Carter shook his head.

“Why am I not surprised?” he said.

While the wolves kept up their serenade of the moon, Carter crawled into his sleeping bag and stared up into the sky.

“This has been a very strange trip,” he muttered.

Then he burrowed down into the bag as far as he could and squeezed his eyes shut.

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 49

Giancarlo opened his eyes and looked up into a shroud of gray. It was morning, the next day, perhaps a few minutes past dawn. It was impossible to tell for sure. A blanket of clouds had moved in over the mountains during the night, obscuring the sky above and the valley below. Giancarlo propped himself up on an elbow and looked about. Save for the rugged terrain within his immediate surroundings, the rest of the world was lost behind a wall of mist.